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19/02/10

A biscuit frenzy in Feexby HQ today!

In honour of the traditions of fast and abstinence that apply during Lent though there was none of your fancy chocolate nonsense. I took biscuit buying back to basics and came back from the supermarket with not one but two packets of Fig Rolls.

Ah Fig Rolls.

If you are unfamiliar with these biscuits then you have missed out on one of the biscuit realm’s more recherché joys. A Fig Roll is not for the amateur biscuit eater. It is not an entry-level snack. Neither is it for the gourmet biscuit aesthete. There is too much of the artisan about it, not enough of the artist. But it does evidently push the button for some hardcore cookie nibblers, and I am among their number.

Basically your Fig Roll consists of a gritty macerated lump of figgy stuff thinly encapsulated by a claggy sort of sweet biscuit shell. It is delicious.

During my ill-starred university days I went out with a lovely and fiercely quick-witted girl called Anne-Marie. At one point we had become mired in an attritional war of food puns. It had started with movie titles I think (The Sound Of Muesli, that was one), but it had gradually moved into other spheres of entertainment and had stopped being funny weeks before we managed to put an end to it.

At one point I thought I had come up with a classical music game-killer in the form of Carl Orff’s Carmina Banana, but straightaway Anne-Marie came back with Mozart’s The Marriage of Fig Roll.

Twenty-four years later and I am still looking for something to top that.

Marriage of Fig Roll is the best! Here, we call them Fig Newtons. I don’t know why, but it reminds me of a similar event during my college days. The father of one of my friends was starting up a weird company; a kind of aquarium animal of the month club. (I’m serious!) So we all get back from Christmas break to find we’ve been signed up as test subjects. There were these lengthy forms to fill out about each arrival. Was it still alive? How alive? How long did it take to snuff it? That kind of thing.

Anyway, The fish didn’t fare too well. The shrimpy things, maybe they were those Sea Monkeys you could send away for from the back of comic books, lived a little longer. But the NEWTs! The newts thrived and proliferated! Once we realized they would live, and this is where this long train of reminiscence hooks up to yours, we began to name them. The first was Fig Newt. The football player and physics major friend had Newt Rockne & Isaac Newt. Other friends had Olivia Newt John, Lorraine Newt & Randy Newt. The three that belonged to me were: Newt York Times, My Newt & 6 o’clock Newt.

Eventually, we were overrun with newts and the joke had run its course, so they just got numbers. To miy mind though, Fig Newt was still the best.